Carl Westin

24 Strategic Conformance: A Literature Survey T ABLE 2-1: Arguments for and against heuristic forms of automation (after Kirwan and Flynn 29 ) Arguments for Arguments against Since it will “behave” like a good controller would, giving reasonable suggestions, it will have face validity and be more intuitive, fos- tering trust and acceptance. If the solution is based on controller strategies, there is no advantage of automation. As solutions suggested will be similar to what the controller might suggest, the controller can quickly understand and infer why the solution was suggested. If controllers are not sufficiently homogeneous it will be difficult to identify a single strategy that applies to all. Solutions will be built on controller strategies which are known to work and have “stood the test of time.” Experts cannot readily explain their expertise which complicates strategy elicitation. It will be easier for controllers to determine when something is wrong (e.g., system fail- ure). The automation will make the same mistakes as the controller. tomation. These typically follow a similar pattern: after detecting a potential con- flict, an algorithm calculates, based on a set of formalized pre-defined problem- solving heuristics, alternative solutions and presents them to the controller, 31, 35, 90, 91 thus acting as an externalized mental library of heuristics. Given human cognitive limitations and possibilities of automation superiority in performance, it may seem counterintuitive to propose that automation should ad- here to human ways of problem-solving. This, however, has been reflected upon in previous literature. For example, Kirwan and Flynn 29 considered arguments for and against the cognitive tools concept underpinning EUROCONTROL’s Controller Resolution Assistant (CORA) automation (Table 2-1). One of the arguments against heuristic forms of automation is the potential variation in preferred solution. If operators differ in their decision-making strategies and disagree on how to solve problems, there is little value in a system that may only match the decision-making style of a few operators. This issue, however, is not unique to heuristic forms of automation, but applies equally to other forms of automation. Instead of treating decision-making diversity as a threat, we can incorporate it as an advantage in au- tomation design.